The use of fleets of office equipment, such as digital printers and copiers, with each piece of equipment interconnected by a network, is well known. It is also familiar, with large customers of office equipment, for a vendor to provide the customer with a customized business arrangement by which the customer may or may not own the equipment but nonetheless pays the vendor, to some extent, on a per-print, per-use, or “click charge” basis, being debited for the use of each machine as it occurs. Network capabilities are used by the vendor for accounting for the real-time use of each of a fleet of machines, such as within a monthly billing period.
Certain types of customers have unusual demands on office equipment. In one example, a customer having one or more printers may have a predictable and relatively low daily usage of the machines; but, on two days out of every month, the customer must output a large number of monthly reports, causing a “spike” in usage for those two days. The customer could in theory use a high-speed, high-volume printer on those two days, but may not need such capabilities for the rest of the month. Also, the customer may not wish to pay for such speed and volume capabilities when he is not using them.
It is known that a basic hardware “platform” of a given type of printing apparatus, such as a xerographic printer, can be readily controlled, such as via software, to have a particular output speed: predetermined voltages can be applied to motors, data can be sent to a laser at a predetermined rate, etc. More specifically, larger xerographic printers can be controlled to have a certain number of “pitches,” or page-size image areas, associated with each rotation of a rotatable photoreceptor drum or belt. By controlling the machine to have more or fewer images of a given size placed on the photoreceptor with each rotation, the speed of the apparatus, in terms of output prints per minute, can be altered.